What was life like in Ireland prior to the Famine?

mariaalice

What I think is interesting is say you look at the Desmond Rebellion roughly the sixteenth century the vast majority of Irish people were still more or less living in tribes and living in small clusters of round wattle and daub huts.

Qualitymark

mariaalice wrote: »

What I think is interesting is say you look at the Desmond Rebellion roughly the sixteenth century the vast majority of Irish people were still more or less living in tribes and living in small clusters of round wattle and daub huts.

Were they, though? How much evidence is there of what the lifestyle was in Ireland then? The planters moved into the castles and great houses of the principal families of Munster; they had wine cellars and so on. But can you direct me to a reliable source that describes how people lived in 1550?

mariaalice

Well not everyone of course, but if you look at something like The Battle of Glenmalure, it describes how the English army were an actual Army they work the uniform of Red coats while the side under Fiach McHugh O'Byrne were describe as a clan.

As for the type of housing that I got form a book on vernacular Irish houses, its says that the typical Irish cottage didn't become common until the seventeenth century.

pedroeibar1

gaiscioch wrote: »

Try that again, this time without trying to put down a new participant or their contribution simply because you don't share it. I notice acerbic posts are a pattern in your numerous contributions, and that this forum is unfortunately not as busy as one would expect an Irish history forum to be. I sense, too, that you're a bit fundamentalist in your views, and have plenty of time to spend being so, so I'll just find out how to put you on ignore rather than allowing you to drag me down to your level where you'll beat me by experience. Oh, and you're wrong about practically everything there. Goodbye.

Let’s try it again then. We are discussing the decades before the Famine. You, with going on 400 posts, are hardly a newbie to Boards. You get ‘called’ on a remark that – timewise - is the equivalent to citing the Napoleonic Wars in a debate on WW2 and make a comment that is plain wrong. And on top of that you say I’m wrong in ‘practically everything’ without furnishing one, not even one, example. What do you expect me to say?

Instead of saying nothing, (or if you do not like my post, using the ‘Report’ button), you engage in a personal attack and some back seat modding and whining. Gaiscioch my foot, you should change your name!

pedroeibar1

mariaalice wrote: »

Well not everyone of course, but if you look at something like The Battle of Glenmalure, it describes how the English army were an actual Army they work the uniform of Red coats while the side under Fiach McHugh O'Byrne were describe as a clan.

As for the type of housing that I got form a book on vernacular Irish houses, its says that the typical Irish cottage didn't become common until the seventeenth century.

Don't mind the folklore, uniforms did not become standard in the British army until the mid 1600's, under Parliament's 'New Model Army.' That was almost 100 years after O'Byrne's birth.

We had a debate on what constitutes a vernacular Irish house way back, I'll have to search for it.

It's here , from #28 on

Flex

Thanks for all the replies, been great to read.

I suppose in terms of what exactly I was wondering, as I saw some people were suggesting the thread was going off topic, I suppose... If for example I was dropped into Mayo or Kilkenny or some other part of Ireland in the 1830s, what exactly would I have been confronted with? As mentioned in my OP, I had read county populations of Ireland pre-famine and Ireland appeared to have a very evenly spread out population

Dublin, for example, was the largest city in a country of 9m people, but only had a population of 200,000 or so. So my impression was Ireland was full of dozens of medium-large towns on a par with Galway/Limerick/Cork today. However, having read up on some sources I found that over 85% of the country lived in settlements of less than 1,500 people, and that these settlements consisted of hovels and huts with little or no commercial of industrial outlets? The quotes and links to people who gave documented accounts of what Ireland was like back then were excellent to read in regards to that

Looking at how the population and country had become so utterly impoverished by the 1840's, would it have been possible to sustain that population while trying to develop the country into a moderately wealthy nation on par with other European nations in the 20th century? I mean it seems it wasnt a case that certain regions of the country were poor; the entire country seemed extremely poor as a result of the act of union, with a large majority of people living in squalor and no economic base to drive development with?

Again thanks for the replies, have really enjoyed reading thus far. Found reading about the famine in the 1740s incredible. Also thought it incredible in the context of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the famine in 1740 and the famine in the 1840's, that the population of Ireland was nearly halved every hundred years for 3 centuries in a row

Qualitymark

Dublin is two cities. In 1700 Dublin’s population was 50,000 - mostly Protestants of the Established Church. By 1798 it had ballooned to 191,000, with most of the new citizens Catholic, as well as a new population of dissenters - Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers and Huguenots.

Going back a bit, here's a middle-class castle from the 1580s http://www.tullauncastle.com/history/

Somewhere, around 10 years ago, I came across a description of a foreign visitor coming into a small cove on the west coast - Connemara? Mayo? - around 1800, I think, and being lavishly entertained with the best wines and food, not laid on specially, but what the local well-off were having for dinner. Wherever it was, the Famine hit it catastrophically, and such a scene would have been inconceivable in 1850. Wish I could remember where the quote was from! It is ever so…

mariaalice

I suppose it is one of those areas thats very hard to quantify, but some random things that would make you think for example... Kerry cattle they were bread for small subsistence farms which mean substance farming must have included dairying not just growing potatoes, in the botanic gardens there are examples of native apple trees for Cavan and Monaghan which must mean agricultural practices must have been developed enough to have native breads.

I always thought the reason for having small cluster of cottages together was because the rundale system of agriculture was common in Ireland.

While we might assume living in a two or three roomed cottage and cooking over an open fire was dire poverty, we cant assume the people themselves at that time perceived themselves to be living in poverty.

pedroeibar1

mariaalice wrote: »

.......... for example... Kerry cattle they were bread for small subsistence farms which mean substance farming must have included dairying not just growing potatoes, i.................
While we might assume living in a two or three roomed cottage and cooking over an open fire was dire poverty, we cant assume the people themselves at that time perceived themselves to be living in poverty.

Kerry cattle date to the Neolithic era and probably are the oldest breed in Europe and predate 'small subsistance farms' by more than a thousand years. Ireland was different to Europe in that era, as the Kerries were bred for milk/butter, whereas the continental breeds were bred for meat and as draught animals.

Two or three rooms was luxury. Over a third of the 'houses' (1841 Census) were one-room hovels with and earth floor, no chimney, frequently no windows and a piece of sacking for a door. In the poorer rural districts the percentages were much higher. Cities were little better for the poor.

mariaalice

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Kerry cattle date to the Neolithic era and probably are the oldest breed in Europe and predate 'small subsistance farms' by more than a thousand years. Ireland was different to Europe in that era, as the Kerries were bred for milk/butter, whereas the continental breeds were bred for meat and as draught animals.

Two or three rooms was luxury. Over a third of the 'houses' (1841 Census) were one-room hovels with and earth floor, no chimney, frequently no windows and a piece of sacking for a door. In the poorer rural districts the percentages were much higher. Cities were little better for the poor.

How did people cook if they had no chimneys, They has a fire that went through an open hole in the roof? so in essence they were not much different from the wattle and daub huts the Vikings had.

Arsemageddon

Thanks for all the replies, been great to read.

I suppose in terms of what exactly I was wondering, as I saw some people were suggesting the thread was going off topic, I suppose... If for example I was dropped into Mayo or Kilkenny or some other part of Ireland in the 1830s, what exactly would I have been confronted with? As mentioned in my OP, I had read county populations of Ireland pre-famine and Ireland appeared to have a very evenly spread out
population

Dublin, for example, was the largest city in a country of 9m people, but only had a population of 200,000 or so. So my impression was Ireland was full of dozens of medium-large towns on a par with Galway/Limerick/Cork today. However, having read up on some sources I found that over 85% of the country lived in settlements of less than 1,500 people, and that these settlements consisted of hovels and huts with little or no commercial of industrial outlets? The quotes and links to people who gave documented accounts of what Ireland was like back then were excellent to read in regards to that

If you haven't seen it before the Ordnance Survey's free map viewer has the First Ed. OS maps available online. These maps generally date from just before the Famine and incredibly accurate. They can be overlain with modern OS mapping to show the growth of towns etc.
http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,591271,743300,0,7


Descriptions of individual towns, parishes, etc can be found in 'A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland' by Samuel Lewis (1837). It's a bit dry, but a good source of information on agriculture industry, etc.
http://www.libraryireland.com/topog/

John O'Donavon's Ordnance Survey letters are primarily interested in Antiquities and the origin of place-names, but they often give vivid (and funny) descriptions of towns and people he met on his travels. The original handwritten letters have been scanned and are available at the link below. Many of the OS letters have also been published in county specific volumes and are available at local libraries.
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/digital-book-collection/digital-books-by-subject/ordnance-survey-of-irelan/

£$%& &%$ - Most of my post just disappeared!

There are actually a lot of contemporary accounts of Pre-Famine Ireland on both askaboutireland and libraryireland - happy reading!

Arsemageddon

mariaalice wrote: »

How did people cook if they had no chimneys, They has a fire that went through an open hole in the roof? so in essence they were not much different from the wattle and daub huts the Vikings had.

It's still possible to have a fire in a house with no chimney. The smoke seeps out through the thatch. This has the advantage of keeping the thatch dry and relatively free from creepie-crawlies, it also has the obvious disadvantage of having a house full of smoke. As hot air rises the smoke tends to sit in the upper part of the room.

Small dwellings in the 1700-1800's were generally built from mud-brick rather than wattle. Mud brick is simple to make and use and doesn't require the extensive land use and management that coppicing hazel does. Stone was expensive to build with as it had to be quarried or purchased. That's why Pedro's post refers to houses with no chimneys.

Incidentally, from prehistory onwards daub wasn't often used in association with wattle in Ireland. This is probably because the climate was too wet. It's probable that animal hides were hung over the walls to provide a wind break. These could then be removed on dry, breezey days to let the dwelling air.

pedroeibar1

mariaalice wrote: »

How did people cook if they had no chimneys, They has a fire that went through an open hole in the roof? so in essence they were not much different from the wattle and daub huts the Vikings had.

Correct. That is why, if they had a bit of bacon, it was hung from a rafter, to cure in the smoke. The lucky ones had a bastible pot (the one like a witch's cauldron) that had a lid and also doubled as an oven. Furze was used to bring the heat up as it burned at a higher temperature than turf.

Irish cabins often were worse than wattle and daub as frequently they were built into a hillside, the hill forming one wall and part of two others of the cabin. The walls were rocks interspaced with sods of earth. Rotten, damp, that is why TB (Phthysis) was such a common killer.

thickhead

It was bleak. I remember on my third birthday it was the day the potatoes just stopped coming. I said to herself I said it will be a long winter.

mariaalice

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Correct. That is why, if they had a bit of bacon, it was hung from a rafter, to cure in the smoke. The lucky ones had a bastible pot (the one like a witch's cauldron) that had a lid and also doubled as an oven. Furze was used to bring the heat up as it burned at a higher temperature than turf.

Irish cabins often were worse than wattle and daub as frequently they were built into a hillside, the hill forming one wall and part of two others of the cabin. The walls were rocks interspaced with sods of earth. Rotten, damp, that is why TB (Phthysis) was such a common killer.

So basically when you go to something like the Ulster America folk park or the like, its all fantasy and not an accurate description at all.

pedroeibar1

The poorest of the poor in pre-Famine Ireland did not 'live', they 'survived' and operated largely in a society that was often was cashless . What you have got to do is put what you are seeing in context - is it a village house, a 15-acre farmer's cottage, or a conacre labourer's cottage. There were huge differences. I've never been to the folk park, so I don't know what story they tell or how disneyfied they are. I remember talking to a woman who did a stint in Bunratty folk park as an actress and she had some really funny stories about what visitors said to her, like an American teenager who tried to explain electricity to her and what it could do!

mariaalice

I have been to both, and the Ulster America folk park is more on the educational side and less Disney, however that does not make it more accurate.

One of the things I keep meaning to do is go to the museum of country life in Castlebar which I would like to think would be balanced as its a museum.

Qualitymark

In the Strawberry Beds I've seen an 18th-century cottage (long preserved but now alas fallen in tragic circumstances after the thatch was neglected and let in damp which ruined the walls), which actually was daub and wattle - you could see the hurdles of basketwork as the walls decayed away. However, this is an area that was inhabited largely by some obscure Protestant sect, and many of the local surnames are English and Scottish.

galwaycyclist

As someone who does a lot of hillwalking in Connemara I would observe that you see lots of signs of "fields" - more scraps of land - that clearly were once used to cultivate potatoes. The regular ridges are very distinctive.

But signs of any dwellings that the cultivators may have lived in are comparatively rare.

I work on the assumption that whatever structures they lived in have melted back into the earth.

Flex

galwaycyclist wrote: »

As someone who does a lot of hillwalking in Connemara I would observe that you see lots of signs of "fields" - more scraps of land - that clearly were once used to cultivate potatoes. The regular ridges are very distinctive.

But signs of any dwellings that the cultivators may have lived in are comparatively rare.

I work on the assumption that whatever structures they lived in have melted back into the earth.

Thats a point of interest with me as well. The population of Connaught in 1841 was 1.5m, today its roughly only 500,000. Was there really absolutely no infrastructure, where are all the remnants of the tens of thousands of surplus dwellings and buildings that wouldve been necessary to sustain three times todays population in the same area? I suppose it comes back to my original presumption of Ireland having dozens and dozens of towns being completely wrong and instead being comprised of countless little make shift huts and hovels that disappeared 'back into the earth'

Qualitymark

There were also in Connacht then, as in the other three provinces, many 'Big Houses', some of which (both Irish and planter) are said to have maintained to a great extent the old Gaelic traditions; Maria Edgeworth, who writes of the life she knew, describes one as having 104 people sit down to table there every day.
But yes, the ravages of the landlord system had thrown people down to such a state that the vast majority were scraping out a living in hovels made of mud; if they built anything better their rent would be raised or they would be dispossessed of their home, even with crops in the ground.
Another wonderful book, Maamtrasna: the Murders and the Mystery by Jarlath Waldron, gives a clear and horrifying description of how people lived in the mountains behind that trendy crossroads in Connemara now inhabited by multinational millionaires and visited by the fly-fishing aristocracy.
Even in the 1930s and 1940s, when people lived lives of luxury unimaginable to their ancestors of a century before, it was the norm to go out in teeming rain with just a piece of sacking tied around the shoulders.
And when from the 1960s to the 2000s country people built the maligned Bungalow Bliss models of houses, they were building something that may have been unaesthetic, may have made the Dublin aesthete shudder delicately, but they were building houses that were warm and comfortable and spacious and thrifty.

kildarejohn

Much interesting discussion here about overall economic and social conditions in Ireland pre/post famine. But in my opinion "all history is local" and I find it very interesting to review the effects of the famine in individual local areas. There are now several online sources that make it possible to study your own local area.
http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/census1926results/volume1/C%201926%20V1%20T4.pdf - this and other pages from CSO give comparative population data. One interesting key point in this table is that in the 1851-1861 period the biggest population loss was not in Connaught, but in Tipperary.
If you want to go right down to parish and townland level, then http://www.dippam.ac.uk/eppi/documents/14544/eppi_pages/375695 has all the data. If you are familiar with a particular parish you can relate this data to the historic maps on osi.ie and identify on the ground what houses "disappeared" between 1841 and 1861 - it is of course all the smallest with no land.
The actual data available on these sites allows for a more informed discussion of the various hypotheses as regards causes.

Qualitymark

Tipperary? Why, KJ? And was it mostly Protestant (Tipp is the Protestantest place in Ireland outside of Ulster) or Catholic? Was Tipperary badly hit by the Famine?
By the way, why is everyone calling Connacht Connaught? As far as I know, the Connaught is a club in London.

kildarejohn

Qualitymark wrote: »

Tipperary? Why, KJ? And was it mostly Protestant (Tipp is the Protestantest place in Ireland outside of Ulster) or Catholic? Was Tipperary badly hit by the Famine?
By the way, why is everyone calling Connacht Connaught? As far as I know, the Connaught is a club in London.

I don't think we can blame the Protestants for depopulation in Tipperary:). This link doesn't seem to support the view that it was "Protestantest" - do the maths yourself. http://www.dippam.ac.uk/eppi/documents/14549/page/378356

Qualitymark

kildarejohn wrote: »

I don't think we can blame the Protestants for depopulation in Tipperary:). This link doesn't seem to support the view that it was "Protestantest" - do the maths yourself. http://www.dippam.ac.uk/eppi/documents/14549/page/378356

I probably didn't express myself well. What I meant was "Were most of those affected by this depopulation (ie those who died or left) Protestant or Catholic?"

kildarejohn

Qualitymark wrote: »

I probably didn't express myself well. What I meant was "Were most of those affected by this depopulation (ie those who died or left) Protestant or Catholic?"

Sorry for the tongue in cheek response. Interesting question, don't know the answer, could work it out by some number crunching on data from "dippam" site - don't have time for that now myself - any volunteers?

pedroeibar1

@Kildare John – thanks for that dippam link, very useful, I’d used the CSO one before but the former is very useful with its concise presentation format.

@Qualitymark – I have a problem with much of your assertions in #52, but don’t want to get dragged into that debate. All counties were ‘hit’ by the Famine, but those that were really ‘hit’ were the poorest classes everywhere, those who had nothing, so while some landless cottiers were dead from hunger, many 15 acre tenant farmers survived and several very wealthy landlords or upper middle class people died as a result of famine fever, contracted while doing their work as PLGs , Doctors, clergy, etc. Generalisation is dangerous.

AFAIK Wicklow was the “most Protestant” of the counties, largely due to the proselytising of John Darby, a poor parson who was ‘revived’ after a bad fall from a horse. He was +/- one of the central figures in founding what became known as the Plymouth Brethren.

Also, your comment on Strawberry Beds and an “obscure Protestant sect” – are you confusing this with the Quakers, as the Shackleton family settled nearby with their mill? (I’m not to au fait with de history of de nordside!) And in London the Connaught is a hotel, not a club. It was the Saxe-Cobourg Hotel, named after the British Royal family, but like them, it changed its name in WW1 to something less Germanic – maybe it should be called the Windsor Hotel?

KingBrian2

Nobody ever brings up a discussion about the plague that hit Ireland in the 1400's

pedroeibar1

KingBrian2 wrote: »

Nobody ever brings up a discussion about the plague that hit Ireland in the 1400's

It's worth a thread...why not start one and write a bit about it?
...........and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun."

Qualitymark

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Also, your comment on Strawberry Beds and an “obscure Protestant sect” – are you confusing this with the Quakers, as the Shackleton family settled nearby with their mill? (I’m not to au fait with de history of de nordside!)

No, absolutely not Quakers - I don't know what the sect was. Not anything familiar like Methpdists or Presbyterians either. Might have been something like Cooneyites…? One of the neighbours, a sweet woman who used to bring the children on a 'walking bus' along the deadly pathless road to school, had been a member and had a lovely mahogany harmonium and gave it to my mother when she went into a nursing home, with instructions that it should only be given away if it were going to be used a) preferably in prayer, and if that wasn't possible, b) by someone who would play it; she didn't want it broken up or turned into furniture. My mother passed it to me and I had it for 30 years, all the time looking for a home - here it is http://variantharmonics.blogspot.ie. Eventually I found a harmonium-lover in Donegal who took it happily away to restore and play…

KingBrian2 wrote: »

Nobody ever brings up a discussion about the plague that hit Ireland in the 1400's

Oooh, do tell!